Elizabeth Berg: Open House

Random House

$34.95

Review: Elspeth Sandys*

If it's true that there are only seven stories in the world, then Open House is a new take on an old and familiar tale: husband abandons wife and child, wife struggles to put back together the pieces of her life.

Elizabeth Berg is a writer new to me but she is well known in her native America, having written a number of bestsellers and won several awards for her fiction. She lives in Massachusetts, and what struck me most forcefully about this novel was its essential East Coast Americanness.

Samantha (Sam) Morrow is the kind of woman we'd all like to have as our friend: funny, self-deprecating, attractive (but not too attractive!), a touch naive, loving, hopeful, disaster-prone. That her husband, having left her, wants, towards the end of the novel, to come back to her comes as no surprise. Nor does Sam's unequivocal rejection.

For Sam has come to like herself; even to value herself. She has a better relationship with her mother, is closer to her old friends, and has acquired some exotic new ones. Her relationship with her son is deeper than was possible when they both lived under the shadow of the controlling male.

The trouble with the novel is its all too predictable happy ending. Sam meets King, an MIT graduate, who has turned his back on a glittering career to work as a handyman. His sheer unsuitability (he is fat, for God's sake!) makes their ultimate pairing inevitable.

That said, this is a highly entertaining, compulsively readable novel, full of delicious turns of phrase - "I don't blame David for leaving me, I would like to leave me too" - and pithy observations.

Edward, Sam's gay lodger, is described as having hair that looks as though it will recede a bit further if you turn your back. And it is a new take on an old story, even if we are given the happy ending we may desire but can't really believe in.

* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland writer.